Part 50, page 170
Document date November 1983
FBI 164-81, Vault Part 50 p. 170, News clipping, dated Nov 1983 — cooper.theunsolved.net/parts/Cooper-Part-50/pages/170
Transcript
The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.
THE DISCOVERY OF D.B. COOPER THE EVIDENCE PART II by Byron H. Brown
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: This month marks the 12th anniversary of a crime which Time magazine said, "rivaled Alfred Hitchcock's more baroque fantasies" — the hijacking of a Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 enroute from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Wash- ington by a bomb-wielding man known as D.B. Cooper. After he extorted $200,000 from the airline and was delivered four parachutes, as the jet headed south from Seattle to Reno, the skyjacker boldly made good a parachute escape and was never seen again. In our October issue Las Vegas investigative reporter Byron Brown revealed for the first time the true identity of the famous skyjacker. He was Bryant "Jack" Coffelt, a former Leavenworth Penitentiary inmate and life-long con-man, and also a friend of Byron's father, James Brown. In the summer of 1974 Coffelt asked the two to meet him in Joplin, Missouri. From there, they traveled to Oregon with him for the purpose of searching for the $200,000 ransom he had dropped when one of the parachutes he was wearing during the jump mal- functioned. The dummy chute was only one of many attempts by the authorities to foil the crime. The three were unsuccessful in their attempt to find the money, but Byron Brown was able to learn many obscure, never-exposed details about the skyjacking from Coffelt. During the next several years he conducted an extensive investigation of his claims, one which resulted in Coffelt's being identified as D.B. Cooper by two eye-witnesses on the hijacked plane. The investigation was a lonely personal odyssey for Brown, who encountered official resistance at every step of the way, perhaps because Coffelt, it turned out, was for many years a Washington D.C. government informant. Highlights from Brown's investigation, which promises to have far-reaching ramifications, are published for the first time in the following pages of Las Vegan. This month, as the town of Ariel, Washington celebrates its annual "D.B. Cooper Festival" in honor of the skyjacker, the participants should be pleased to know that he has finally been discovered. J.E.S.
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66 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE
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DB Cooper-2077b